He Sat There Eating Toast
by thenlaugh
Summary: ONESHOT. He sat there eating toast one morning. The melodrama that disguised itself as his life had fell short here. And we ignored the thing which we both knew what was most likely to bring us down. Short HarryGinny post HBP slightly drabbleish.


**He Sat There Eating Toast**

A/N: Just a short Harry/Ginny one-shot drabblish thing that popped into my head about ten minutes ago. Inspired by the line in HBP when Harry goes to Mrs Weasley "You know me, I like the quiet life" or something. I've quoted someone who I am ashamed to say I don't know the name of or where it is even from, but all I know is it's one of my friends favourite quotes. Not in the same universe as Fix You, an update for which should be coming in the next two weeks. Enjoy!

* * *

He sat there eating toast. Gone one day and back the next, he had left to save the world, to be a hero. Not that he wasn't one already. He had left to do what only he does best with a sad smile and a brief wave. No passionate kiss goodbye or heartfelt promises, the melodrama that disguised itself as his life had fell short here, just when I had wanted it most. But it had been his goodbye to make, and he made it the way he liked it, plain and simple.

That was him. The messed up boy with more issues than the average Muggle Jerry Springer episode, the boy who sought the inexplicably beautiful normal.

He told me that once. In fact, he had told everyone that in one way or another. He didn't want all this; he just wants to be normal. Just Harry. It's why he had always loved Hogwarts; he wasn't the boy under the stairs anymore, and no-one made him feel like Harry Potter: Boy Who Lived.

He was Harry Potter: boy who lost Gryffindor a heap of points or even Harry Potter: boy whose two best friends fought like Hippogriffs and Thestrals. I liked to believe him when he said that his favourite one yet was Harry Potter: my boyfriend. He said he loved how fantastically ordinary it sounded.

I didn't like the way that that had sounded.

I've never really been an ordinary person. With six wild brothers, masses of vivid red hair, living in a lopsided house with an unkempt garden crawling in garden gnomes, it's no surprise really that I'm a little, well, crazy. Common knowledge was that I was the sort of person who found being called normal or ordinary was an insult of sorts, and I had let him know quite violently that I would not tolerate being considered similar to everyone else. We had had a little row over this that went on so long that we pretended to forgot what it was about to begin with and instead decided to snog on the armchair next to the fire while everyone else was at dinner.

Those were the days. I had never really forgot about our argument though, and neither had he judging by the way he had changed the topic rapidly whenever something that was even slightly close was in the air.

We just pretended; we ignored the thing which we both knew what was most likely to bring us down. Apart from Voldemort of course.

He wanted normality and I wanted something more. He seeked something quiet, and I thrived of excitement. But we still wanted each other too. Opposites attract, Ron and Hermione had already proved that, but with us… we thought we were too alike to be different.

And when we realised that we were, it was a shock to the system. Equally good and bad, two simplistic, delicate extremes brought on by the slightest variation.

And he sat there eating toast.

Out of everything my mum would cook, he picked toast. Not pancakes, not Eggs Benedict. Toast. Not even interesting toast. It could have something odd on it, like honey and peanut butter or some of that odd tasting Australian black spread. Simple Harry had gone with just a smear of butter on plain white toast. Normal was what he aimed for, but even this didn't come out the way he intended it to.

The toast was undercooked, more like bread that had been sitting in the sun and had been heated up a bit. It was barely toast at all. And thinking along that line, that coffee sitting in front of him sure was light too, and if I remember right he never had any sugar with it. Mad. His hands were fiddling slightly as he flicked through a book on magical relics, and he was chewing on his lip.

Whatever he did, right down to the undercooked toast or pale sugarless coffee, Harry was never normal, no matter how hard he seemed to try.

Or maybe he was. Maybe he was just not normal to me. Maybe his normal was what I wanted. Maybe I was his normal. Maybe the normal what he looked for was what I was used to; excitement and always being on your toes with something new. This was him trying to be normal, and I found it utterly fascinating.

Perhaps everyone is just compellingly weird; who wants to be normal anyway, normal is just a setting on Hermione's Muggle hairdryer.

Maybe we all are something above and beyond what we all expect.

It's all changed now, a strange mutation into rightness. Harry Potter: boy who hates that he is a hero with odd mannerisms who may, despite my earlier thoughts, want just what I want.

A life he calls normal, what I call living.

He sat there eating toast.

"What are you doing here?" I ask him that morning in my kitchen. He looks up, glasses gleaming in the early sun.

"We think Hermione broke her ankle. She's okay though, Ron's with your mum who's fixing it now." He examines his final piece of boring toast, going slightly cold and soggy on his plate. A cheekily innocent smile crosses his features as he looks up at me, holding out his plate. "Toast, Gin?"

I consider him for a moment before reaching out and taking it.

* * *

A/N: Reviews appreciated. 


End file.
